The online home of the self-published comics & prose anthology, Warrior27, an homage to Britain's early-80s comic magazine, Warrior - along with the various writings, musings, and miscellany of Dan Fleming and Chris Beckett.

Jump right into
the story.This series opens with a man,
bloodied and in tattered clothes, walking down a hillside in the desert.Readers are immediately pulled into this
story by asking where this guy came from, why he’s in such bad shape, and other
similar questions.Done well, as Smith
does here, this can be a very effective way to open a story.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

In this science
fiction narrative, Jeff Smith is creating a “lived in, run down” world.With his clean style, he manages to convey
the typical decay of the settings through well-placed marks – scattered dashes
– that mar the pristine white spaces of the page and effectively convey this
rough, genuine quality that was lauded in Star Wars.

RECOMMENDATION: A

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS It’s Jeff Smith doing something completely different
from Bone, but it’s still stellar cartooning.RASL is a time travel story that incorporates the theories of Nikola
Tesla, a love triangle, parallel worlds with parallel versions of many of the
main characters, and a mystery about who is trying to capture Rasl and what
they want him for.Great stuff.

In volume 1,
Smith used the age-old action cliché of having the villain be a poor shot with
a gun and I thought nothing of it, having seen this trope used myriad times in
film, comics, and TV.But in this
volume, he turns that cliché on its head when the villain confronts our
protagonist again and reveals to Rasl that he missed him on purpose.By doing this, Smith puts that earlier scene
into a far different context, opening up a number of question for the reader (why
did he let him go before? Is he lying now?) while also opening up story
possibilities for the writer.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

In a parallel
world, Rasl meets an alternate version of his true love named Uma, and as they
are getting to know each other, in a private viewing at the museum where Uma is
curator, Rasl starts to daydream about his past with the alternate version of
Uma and he tunes her out.Smith conveys
this by having Uma’s word balloons empty, and then he pulls in closer with
successive panels, showing Rasl’s focus on her, until she leans down into the
final panel of the page, where Smith has her face in close-up, and she asks if
he’s even listening to her?I thought
this was a really novel and effective way to convey Rasl’s mental state through
the visuals.

RECOMMENDATION: A

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS Smith really knows how to tell a story.As good as this is, I only hope that he will
stick the ending.

This is a
science fiction story about parallel universes, but Smith utilizes real history
and real science within the narrative – often through flashbacks – to help
ground the story, and it works very well.The big lesson is, if you’re going to tell a fantastic story try to base
it within some semblance of reality to give readers something to “hold onto”
and allow them to accept the out of this world elements.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

In this
penultimate collection, things are starting to get out of Rasl’s control.Time is becoming elastic, and his stress may
be feeding into this.Smith conveys this
with an imaginative two-page spread with multiple images of the Uma drawn over
an imaginative, abstract background.This works really well for a number of reasons.

One, up to this
point much of the settings and much of the imagery has been relatively
grounded.Allowing for the conceit of time
travel, little else “fantastical” has been seen in the story.

Two, Smith’s
very clean art style has also helped to ground the story, so that when we get
an abstract image such as this two-page spread, it makes a big impact.

Three, similar
to how Moore & Gibbons used the page in Watchmen or Frank Miller used the
page in Dark Knight Returns, this is the first time there’s been a two-page
spread, and one of the few times where there are not multiple panels on a
page.By saving this large canvas for
this important moment, Smith has not diluted the impact and manages to convey
the import of this scene well.

RECOMMENDATION: A

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS RASL came from a discussion Smith had with Terry More
and Paul Pope a few years ago.They all
decided to do their science fiction stories.From that also came Echo from Moore.Now all I need to get is Battling Boy and that trifecta of creative,
sci-fi, comic book goodness will be complete.

#17: The Ticking
Storytellers: Renee French
Publisher: Top ShelfYear Of Publication: 2005
Page Count (can be approximate or in # of issues format): 216 pages

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT WRITING / STORYTELLING:

It’s the little
moments – ones that could be most relatable – that can have the most impact in
a story. Early in this story, the son
draws a picture of the scar on his father’s head, and he gives it to his dad. A
few pages later, the boy sees that picture in the trash, and it was an
incredibly affecting bit of storytelling.French included moments like this throughout the book in a manner that
seemed effortless.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

French uses
shadows very effectively to enhance the emotion of a sad scene, of which there
were many in this book.But she used
this tool sparingly, which was smart, as it could lose its effectiveness if
overused.Maybe it’s an obvious tool,
but it’s one to keep in mind.

RECOMMENDATION: A

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS I had no idea what to expect with this or the other
Renee French book I read for 30 in 30, but I now see why French is held in such
high regard.This story was told mostly
through the pictures and the characters’ body language rather than through the
dialogue, and I found it incredibly affecting.I wish I hadn’t waited as long as I had to finally read some of her
work, but I’m glad that I now have more work of hers to discover.

When writing
alien dialects, one need not be constrained by utilizing our English
alphabet.You can use images instead of
words – made up or otherwise – to show their language in the word balloons

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

The coloring in
this book really stood out for me.The
use of vivid colors was striking in this.And the fact that Moebius used colors for common things (such as the sea
or the characters’ skin tones) that did not match with our expectations (the
sunsets were green, some human-like characters had orange skin) really sold the
alien setting of these stories.

RECOMMENDATION: B

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS This was the first of Epic’s line of Moebius
collection from the 1980s and it includes a few short stories and one longer
story, “Upon a Star,” that are all part of Moebius’s Aedena cycle.They were enjoyable, and the art was amazing,
but there was little ground-breaking in here, in my opinion. Still, these were
very fun and beautiful science fiction stories that I would definitely
recommend, if you’re able to find them at a decent price now.

It’s an old
lesson – and maybe more of a reiteration – that whenever you have characters
with competing viewpoints, you have to view each character’s argument from the
standpoint that “they are in the right.”If we are lazy in contemplating both sides of the argument – spelling it
out in positive terms as a true activist/believer would do – then the dialogue
will not ring true, and it will come across as rhetoric rather than a story.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

One thing
Chadwick likes to do often is show the hidden parts of nature (whether in the
underbrush or beneath the Earth’s surface) in a panel.It not only makes for an interesting and
distinct visual stamp for Concrete, but it also ties in with the main character’s
personal ideology.Utilizing the visuals
to enhance characterization is an interesting tool that I’d like to try and use
in my own work.

Also, incorporating
the entirety of the scene into the creation of the images can be effective and
engaging.In a
specific instance in chapter 1 of “Think Like a Mountain,” the scene turns to
the roof of Concrete’s home, which is on fire.Concrete has solar collectors on the roof, and Chadwick uses them as
inset panels of this scene to show the reaction of those on the ground to the
person on the roof who is dumping the contents of the water collection tank
that Concrete threw up there to stop the fire from spreading.

RECOMMENDATION: B-

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS This book collects the 6-issue series “Think Like a
Mountain” along with a number of shorter stories that have been published
elsewhere – most often Dark Horse Presents.This was the last of the major Concrete collections for me to read and
it was typical Concrete, which means it is a well-crafted book.Chadwick managed to make the main narrative
flow naturally, and his art was stunning in its detail and imaginative
imagery.Some of the shorter stories
were hit or miss for me, and even when I didn’t enjoy a story, or felt like it
didn’t work fully, I appreciated the experimentation incorporated by Chadwick
in many of these vignettes.If you like
good comics, this is worth reading, and if you’re already a Concrete fan, then
you’ll really enjoy this.

It’s a fine
line between good captions and overly expositional ones.For the most part, Strnad manages to create
poetical captions that add to the story without feeling intrusive.This first series being published in 1983, I
don’t know how familiar he was with Alan Moore’s work, but he seems to be
plowing the same fields, so to speak, as he creates lyrical prose that reads
easily for his captions, rather than the overly dramatic exclamations that Stan
Lee had made so popular.

WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT ART / STORYTELLING:

To open the
mini-series, Gil Kane created a full-page montage over which Strnad wrote a
brief history of Ray Palmer (the Atom) and Jean Loring (Palmer’s wife).I love Kane’s work, and having a great piece
of art over which to relay essential information for any new readers is a great
way to introduce those readers and get the story going immediately on the
following page.If only, they had been
able to do this for the subsequent issues of this series, but sadly they did
the fairly typical 3-page cut-and-paste “this is what happened in the previous
issues” exposition in the following issues.

RECOMMENDATION: C

NOTES / REVIEW / SYNOPSIS

I hadn’t read
this since I originally bought it sometime in the late 80s.I was worried it would not hold up well.With the exception of the multi-page “what
came before” segments, I really enjoyed the mini-series.However, the specials left a bit to be
desired.The first one basically
rehashed the mini-series through the conceit of a biography that had been
written about Ray Palmer.Thankfully,
there was some new material toward the end of the story, but not enough to
really save this.The second special
redeemed itself plotwise, but the continuity it was already building up with
the previous stories bogged it down in exposition they felt was needed to bring
newer readers up to speed.Overall, a
fun read, but nothing I expect to read again.